Hiroki Tanaka, formerly lead guitarist of Juno and Polaris-nominated YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN, captivates throughout his full-length album Isan, out today. Named for the Japanese word for “inheritance,” the album filters his Japanese-Canadian heritage and the tension of inherited religious structures through arrangements that move fluidly between hymnal gravitas, synth-laced rock, and hushed introspection, drawing comparisons to David Bowie, Animal Collective, and Mr. Bungle along the way.
“In order to explore my complex heritage as a descendant of Christian missionaries, I felt compelled to write songs that took the melodic, harmonic, and thematic material from hymns in a Japanese hymnbook I inherited from my grandparents,” Tanaka explains. “As an atheist, I wanted to explore biblical themes from a more scholarly, and secular, perspective. Much like how Michael Ondaatje based In The Skin of a Lion off of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I researched the hymns, proverbs, and passages in The Bible, and used that as a launchpad for my own songwriting.”
Tanaka’s own arrangement of Isamu Miyagawa’s hymn “Ikoi” opens the album with a compelling sense of motion. Stomping rhythms and a glimmering, pulsing tonal intensity move into bellowing vocal elements, consuming with palpable emotion. The hymn’s creator, Miyagawa, was also the inspiration for subsequent track “Yamato,” melding a debonair rock drive and dynamic vocal presence, swelling from suave descriptions to ardent yelps. “We’re homeless everywhere,” Tanaka’s fierce vocals let out, evolving into a synth-laden hook — “everything for Yamato!” The sequence thematically confronts displacement, via “homeless everywhere” and shipwreck imagery, its title-ready beckoning thereafter suggesting both devotion to heritage and the complexity of carrying that identity across oceans.
The album consistently excels in compelling, artful lyricism, embodying Tanaka’s Japanese-Canadian heritage and the effects of inherited religious structures on modern life, through a scholarly lens. “Shame” is another introspective gem, weaving mellow keys amidst introspective vocals, which emit a somber admission — “I fear that man is me” — as haunting organs and pitter-pattering percussion infuse; shades of Radiohead show there. Buzzing synths further the invigorating sense, as a confrontation with self stirs. “My approach was to modernize the lyrics and explore ‘Shame’ provocatively (noting that the Parable of the Lost Son is exclusively a story of men forgiving other men for their fragile masculinity),” Tanaka says.
Another standout track, “Nation of Love” embraces a lusher pop disposition amidst “the trees are on fire / oh my god, the ice is thin” cautions. The dreamy, trickling synth tones build into a harmonious chorus, with surfy backing vocal harmonizing contrasting a blissful sense of purpose with an evident deterioration of circumstances around them. Album finale “Golden House” delights as well, its piano-led arrangement and theatrical vocals consuming. “Brimstone feels so familiar,” they let out into gorgeous strings and soaring vocal mystique, the ensuing “when I was young” retrospections expanding into an array of both bustling fervor and concluding starry-eyed wonder. Isan is an immersive, heady success from Hiroki Tanaka, capturing a journey of self and cultural reverence.
—
“Yamato” and other tracks featured this month can be streamed on the updating Obscure Sound’s ‘Emerging Singles’ Spotify playlist.
